Anna Ziegler’s production of “Photograph 51” directed by Takis Tzamargias was stylistically based on the stage details of an experimental laboratory in the context of the King’s College London biophysics research programme. The space of the Art Theater Basement fits perfectly into the closed and suffocating laboratory environment, in a cold stage atmosphere that conveys the loneliness of Rosalind Franklin, a chemist who worked alone for endless hours in the field of biophysics to record human DNA. in crystallography. She built her own modernized X-ray machine and, after hundreds of hours of exposure, was able to capture Photo 51, a milestone in the sequencing of the human genome. Author Anna Ziegler is concerned with the moral responsibility of science to human existence, and with the attitude of moral neutrality adopted by the scientist when his interest in knowledge is combined with his insatiable desire for power, economic power, and social projection.

The play is a major undertaking in the realm of drama that chronicles the life journey of Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) on the “loneliest journey” in the world: that of an explorer. The director emphasized the narrative flow of the theatrical action and followed a commentary line of ironic-caustic tone, mainly in the management of two male roles, scientists Francis Crick and James Watson. His performance is restrained because it emerges from a cold exposure of conflicts, internal and interpersonal, reaching the limits of Brechtian detachment.

Lena Drosaki subtly and sensitively observes and captures the mental fluctuations of the heroine. She portrays the rational personality of Franklin, who works hard and puts his life in danger. At the age of 36, she suffers from ovarian cancer due to long exposure to radiation. Drosaki correctly avoided emotional outbursts, wandered in the glamor of death, conveyed Franklin’s obsession with details, perfectionism and passion for research with cold facial expressions, until she found a way to capture the double helix of DNA and “separate the two forms of male and female from lovemaking.” She obsessively searched for scientific truth, was interested in its equations, but did not include her human factor in them. A good moment for the actress to express the theater-loving side of Franklin’s personality is when she references Peter Brook’s 1951 production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, setting the time frame.

The art of gesture and bodily play of eloquent grimaces and intense externalization is evaluated by the viewer in the performance of the scientific duet of Crick and Watson. The persuasiveness of Dimitris Magina (Scream) and Dimitris Passa (Watson) in the roles of famous biophysicists is the merit of the performance, which allows the viewer to catch the playwright’s ironic point of view on two Nobel laureates who, according to recent evidence, used part of Franklin’s research without giving her the recognition that she deserves.

Rosalind Franklin was exposed to massive amounts of radiation to crystallize human DNA and died of cancer at the age of 36.

Alexandros Burdumis’ performance as Maurice Wilkins’ partner highlights the hidden romantic element between them. Manos Stefanakis, as Gosling’s assistant, gives a performance of genuine sensibility and soul, with lively elements of expressive acting, light movements and body posture that sometimes works as a comic counterbalance to the dramatic load. Production designer Asi Dimitrolopoulou uses a combination of a video projection (Goran Gagich) of excerpts from the researcher’s original notes and a background of mountain landscapes, emphasizing the heroine’s admiration for nature.

Questions remain about the extent to which Franklin’s research has been underestimated by her male colleagues, and opinions often differ. Photo 51 is a first in Greece and the show is supported by the Association of Oncology Pathologists (EOPE) and the Association of Women Oncologists (W4OHellas).

The audience in the finale relives all the successive “ifs” surrounding Franklin’s short life, all those “ifs” that could refer to normal life, normal, perhaps ordinary life, “if Franklin had been born in a different era”, “if she I still had a few more days to live,” if, after all, “she wasn’t a woman.”

* Ms. Rhea Grigoriou holds a PhD in History and Drama from AUTH and a Professor in Greek Culture at EAP.